Manor and the winds of change...

[Project 644]

Alfie Noakes said:

de ja vu?

Oui Monseiur.

[zac510]

The Acura hasn't been that quick, the absence of Audi and Penske Porsche LMP2 teams has flattered them a bit.

But no doubt the Wirth team know what they're doing. Their choice to run the rear tyres on the front was quite innovative and honed the car to the American tracks. Dicing with privateers in sportscars or the top F1 teams/manufacturers, which one is more difficult?

[skwdenyer]

AndrewW-G said:

egomeister said:

As an aside, does anyone know how much grunt the Wirth cfd computer has?

Cant comment on the Wirth Computer, but here's something on Albert2 BMW's CFD box from 2 and a bit years ago (applying Moores law would see it up by almost 75% today)

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,3928...

These days you don't need to confine yourself to running on your own supercomputer; you can just rent time on other peoples'. Especially if you have a decently portable CFD code (no wacky system-specific hacks) then there is an (albeit relatively small) global marketplace for supercomputing cycles.

Taking that approach, you can pre-book time to suit your needs, rather than dealing with the overhead of running a large system in-house 24/7. It also becomes a quite major source of potential sponsorship opportunities: "don't give us money, give us time on your large systems".

[entropy]

Finchy172 said:

This years Acura LMP1 car was solely built on CFD

No it wasn't.

About 2 weeks was spent in the windtunnel

[Finchy172]

entropy said:

Finchy172 said:

This years Acura LMP1 car was solely built on CFD

No it wasn't.

About 2 weeks was spent in the windtunnel

I could have sworn that the race car engineering article on this said that the car wasnt designed in the wind tunnel and all of the aero was produced from CFD only. Im not talking about verification of CFD vs Wind tunnel once its been designed but throughout the design phase before the first race.

[lozriva]

Jungles said:

egomeister said:

entropy said:

Nick Wirth has his own R&D company and designed this year's Acura LMP1 mainly with CFD.

But the aero on an LMP is nothing compared to that of f1. I just can't see cfd providing accurate enough results to develop a car to the level of detail seen in f1.

"Nothing compared to that of f1" is a bit much. LMP1 cars are as technologically advanced as F1 in aerodynamics.

I don't know about that one...

[german tony]

Manor will be ok as long as Nick Wirth remains mates with Max.

Allegedly